The director of Safe House tackles his first off-world adventure with Life.
I never thought I would be allowed to tackle it, you know?
The Swedish-born director admits when we catch up with him via phone.
Its more like an absent dream.
When you make movies in Sweden, the budgets are $500,000.
Of course, I always admired science fiction, like all of us.
Yet the idea of doing a sci-fi project was not a strange one for him.
I think most directors have this kind of strange attraction or magnetism to the genre, he muses.
When Tarkovsky didSolaris, nobody thought that he would enter that realm or when Francois Truffaut didFahrenheit 451.
It is a fascinating genre.
Who hasnt been inspired bySolarisand2001andAlienandThe Thingby Carpenter?
You also have great modern masterpieces like CuaronsGravityor NolansInterstellarso it is a fascinating area.
The ISS crew led by Reynolds, Jake Gyllenhaal and Rebecca Ferguson must somehow contain and destroy it.
Then one thing that really struck me was the realism that was different.
Compared toAlien, which takes place in this dystopian future, this movie takes place today.
Theres a great possibility that life has existed in some shape or form on Mars, he explains.
Theres this connection between it.
Mars always became this symbol of the alternative that there was something out there.
Hes like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of England and helped out movies likeEx Machina.
He was so insightful and had a pure science perspective of what the creature might be.
I just gave him the script and said, Create something from this kind of rule book.
Give us a molecular structure.
Give us a cellular structure.
Give us different propositions of how this can develop.
Then they worked together and came up with an idea.
Then you add zero gravity, which you better make people fly through the station.
I kind of liked those restrictions.
And I go, Who the fuck is Stanley?
Its a camera, you have some actors, and people are paid for it, he says.
The more they pay for it, the more opinions they will have when youre finished.
Its not difficult to understand.
Lifeis out in theaters tomorrow.
